9 Suggestions: What to Post on Social Media

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Social-Media

Social Media Connects the World

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People are on the Internet for one of two reasons: Either to solve a problem, or to be entertained.   Are you struggling to create daily numerous engaging “posts” on your Social Media sites?  Then you are not the only one on the search of great content. We all want to stand out from our “competition”.  On the other hand, creating content for Social Media should not end up in stress. In a former post I explained that blogs do not necessarily need to consist of written content, but also may be among others, videos, images, curated content, re-posts etc.  The same is true for Social Media content.  How can you achieve this:
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Your Blogs Content
Connect all your Social Media sites and use a scheduling program to post at the best times of the day.  It enables you to publish your message to all of your social media channels at once.  The time you save frees you to communicate with your followers.  Using your blogs content lets you stand out among your peers and makes sure you have original content / messages that no one else posts.  Write posts that resonate with the things your audience cares most about.  Create a document or notepad and start listing your tweets and posts out of short sentences or headlines from your blog or website, add the URL – and voila!  you just have created an archive that you can copy / paste and use forever.
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News Content
Ask questions and tease new stories to encourage people to comment and like. Try to find news in your field that is interesting for your followers. Avoid political and religious topics, as well as gossip. Bookmark the best news sites and comb through them, using their sharing buttons to post on your Social Media sites to save time.  Then spend this time to interact with your followers on a personal level. Relevant News provide something that is shareable, conversational, and engaging for Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social platforms.
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Motivational Quotes
One of the most popular forms of inspirational content are quotes. Nearly everyone loves quotes! And especially quotes with images. Pinterest has helped to make them extremely popular.  Bestselling author Sean Gardner took it a step further:  “I searched online for inspirational content from my supporters, and then started making image quotes with what they wrote and/or said. I believe this is a powerful way for people to connect online.  The greater the diversity of positive, empowering statements, the greater the diversity of people sharing those points of views. ”
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Interact with Followers
Are you a good party guest at the big Social Media party?  Are you commenting or asking questions?  Are you thanking your followers? Invite conversation by asking your followers’ opinions on topics, or asking them to tell you what sorts of content they would appreciate.  Everybody likes being asked, and fans and followers feel extra-appreciated when you fulfill these desires.  It’s all about conversation, that’s why it is called Social Media networking.
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Videos and Slide-Shows
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, and creating a short video is very easy these days. Load it up to YouTube or any other video sharing site and post the URL for your video frequently on your Social Media sites.  On most of them visitors can click it directly to watch your content – and generates almost double the amount of visitors / views and attracts more content and likes or plusses on Google+.  The same is true for slide shares

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Photos
When you are scrolling through the feeds on any social network, what’s the first thing to catch your eye?  I bet images!  No question, photos are THE most popular Social Media tool, and more appealing than text only.  Even if you are not a professional photographer you can use fantastic photos on Social Media – for free.  We listed several sources for free photos you can use on Social Media in former blog posts.  Photos generate more re-tweets and likes, but keep in mind that attaching an image to a Twitter post takes up approximately 11 of your characters.
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Promote or Re-Blog other Posts
Retweets are a great way to get more followers.  By retweeting something that links to a website or blog, you are doing a service to the website mentioned and the person who originally tweeted the article!  Social Media is all about networking. Re-tweeting is a very important part of this.
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Polls and Surveys
Most Social Media sites offer this option automatically. What could be a question for a poll or survey? You could ask your readers for example which one of the book covers for your next thriller or non-fiction book they like best. Survey Monkey offers a free program  that allows you to create a survey in minutes with our intuitive web based tool. PollSnack offers a similar program.
Wepolls.com shows in a YouTube video how it works on their site.

 

Contests
For a photo contest, you can encourage users to submit their own photos and videos in order to win a really attractive prize.  Another possibility would be to organize a “pay with a tweet’ contest to win a free book.  In an earlier blog we explained how fast and easy it is to set it up.  Don’t forget to highlight your contest winners in several posts later on.
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Encouraging Results:
 joint research project by Stanford and Facebook where the perceived vs. actual audience sizes of 220,000 Facebook users were studied.  Each user was asked what they believed to be the size of their audience, then the research team compared this perceived size to an actual size, using server logs to gauge the true scope of a post’s audience.

The result: Your actual audience size is four times larger per post than what you think.  Great News!

Read also:
A Myth: Selling Books Through Social Media?
Are You a Good Party Guest?

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